Hi Tom,

I enjoyed reading your essay. I particularity like the analogies of the fences with open gates and the knife being as important as the cake. You have set out a well argued vision for USA recovery.

I wonder whether climate change and falling oil production in the future will severely affect world trade because of the rising costs and difficulties of transport and logistics.Outsourcing manufacturing and importation of food and goods from all around the world has been cheap. It isn't sustainable though, it is wasting resources. It may be that local production and consumption become once more the most cost cost effective choice and more sustainable too. Then it would be more difficult to get a cut of the wealth by planning and distribution of other countries' 'cakes'. What do you think?

    Jonathan,

    I agree. I should have taken more care to present the solution before the problem. Instead I put it all in a too-short abstract. The problem is depressing; I think there are too few, however, who understand what conditions the liberal secular ideal is responding to, why we fought a revolution here against tyrants from afar, and then another bloody war against tyrants at home.

    In the news, there is this rancher in Nevada who grazes his cattle for free by stealing government owned land, and calls it his right to profit from the property and labors of others. His motives are clear -- he openly wonders if "the Negro" would be better off picking cotton than being unemployed and hanging out on the porch. Clearly, he feels entitled to own and control others and steal with impunity.

    That issue is separate from the issue of fairness in land use laws -- it's a deeper flaw in the American psyche that hangs on to pre-Enlightenment ways of doing things. We can't afford it. The world can't afford it.

    The rancher rides around on his horse waving the U.S. flag (this is literally true, for those who haven't seen the story) -- while contradictorily proclaiming that he doesn't recognize the government. He thinks the Constitution supports his right to plunder and exploit. If it were just this one crazy individual who holds these views, one wouldn't worry about it. The sickness and the ignorance has spread much further.

    All best,

    Tom

    Hi John,

    Yes, I agree -- we speak of the price of money as if it were goods. That's not in itself the problem, though. Money as capital is indeed a commodity that loses value when not traded -- when we reach the state as we have today, that investors are merely trading among themselves and withholding capital from wealth creators, eventually the value of even that limited trade degrades. Not good for either the investors or the investment, because of overproduction and underconsumption, which are two sides of the same coin.

    Best,

    Tom

    Tom,

    One of the main ways of sustaining the value of that excess capital is to have the government, ie. public, borrow it back and fund everything from wars to research with the over-production, then sell off any income producing asset, such as results of the research, to well connected private interests, so while it may not be 'the problem,' it is certainly a problem and one which is shortly going to trigger a crisis and crises are noted as opportune times for change.

    I don't see much being withheld from anyone with even a slim idea for wealth creation, but I do see a lot of unsustainable wealth extraction being used to fund this financial production.

    Regards,

    John

    Yes, John. The thing is that, " ... unsustainable wealth extraction ..." is equivalent to wealth reduction. Did you understand my point about eating the seed corn?

    Thank you, Georgina. I agree in principle that local production/consumption is cost efficient. However, it leaves the locality vulnerable to economic instability (boom-bust), natural disasters and internal self-destructive feedback.

    What I aim to describe is an effective, rather than efficient, global model -- where waste and redundancy are assets. That is, a continually shifting hub of redundant global economic activity is a self-similar, self-reinforcing network that dulls the effects of positive (i.e. out of control) feedback brought on by both internal and external challenges to global stability, while assisting local recovery when needed.

    Such a robust network allows network nodes to act independently when they can and cooperatively when they must.

    I have done no more than scan your essay -- though it looks delightful! I will comment when I can.

    Best,

    Tom

    Hi Eckard,

    Yes, I had a particular reason for focusing on the U.S. For the time being at least, the U.S. leads in the knowledge and technology management requisite to helping create and sustain a globally linked network of resources that can respond quickly and effectively to local economic and natural disasters.

    Best,

    Tom

    Tom,

    Very much so. So even though we frequently don't see eye to eye, sometimes that difference of perspective can lead to broader understanding in other subjects.

    Regards,

    John

    Tom,

    The American way of consumption did indeed conquer the hearts of many people worldwide and caused the collapse of Soviet Union. I am however not sure whether this temptation will still suffice as to get control over religious conflicts like in Syria, nationalism like between Russia and Ukraine, and the seemingly harmless unlimited growth of population.

    When I was a boy, I read a booklet that told me the main center of power and culture was shifting from Greece to Rome, to Eastern Rome, from Spain to France, etc. Maybe, China could get leading in future if mankind will be unable to install an international secular power. I am sure having Nobel correctly understood in that question.

    Regards,

    Eckard

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    • Post #21

    A theory of how to fix the world:

    We don't intend to debate the liberal ideal here -

    we believe in it. We think it's the only sane

    ideal among all choices, because it doesn't

    expect the individual or the society to do the

    same things over and over again only to get the

    same undesirable results; it expects the

    individual to grow on her own terms. What we

    intend, is to frame a scientific perspective that

    allows both believers in democracy, and the

    opposition, to coexist and prosper in the

    inevitable transition to a democratic world. For

    if this transition is not inevitable, extinction of

    the species is all we can look forward to.

    We are trying not to write a political tractate -

    facts are as they are, and we offer to explore a

    fact-based scientific, not political, solution.

    Politics, nevertheless, can as easily pave the way

    for science as for special interests that pay for

    their privileges with expensive lobbying of

    legislators.

    We may see a particular structural model, then,

    as a mode of communication by which individuals, and cultural/political organizations of

    individuals, can freely contribute to the

    common well and drink from it, without being drowned in some doctrine of forced behavior.9

    The motivation for Lim, et al, derives from Bar- Yam's extensive research in complex systems,

    culminating in the theory of multi-scale variety. This theory generalizes the principle that

    lateral, rather than hierarchical, distribution of activity and information drives system

    effectiveness: "In considering the requirements of multi-scale variety more generally, we can state

    that for a system to be effective, it must be able to coordinate the right number of components to

    serve each task, while allowing the independence of other sets of components to perform their

    respective tasks without binding the actions of

    one such set to another." 10

    Underlying is a hidden assumption we wish to make obvious: human free will transcends cultural and

    political boundaries; if the means to cooperate is available, the will follows.

    The means to guarantee entitlements - food, clothing, shelter, education and mobility - is a

    logistics problem.

    We want to explore how high-tech logistics

    management of many small and redundant

    systems, linked in a robust global network,

    makes it possible to guarantee equal global

    sharing of resources without depriving

    individuals of personal access and use of as

    much property as they can acquire, in unequal

    measure. The idea of ownership in this model

    shifts from control of people to control of real

    property in a distributed system:

    Bar-Yam introduced multi-scale variety, the idea

    that independent subsystems allowed to organize

    around task coordination at different times on

    different scales, makes the larger system

    effective. One can summarize: locally efficient

    use of resources assures global effectiveness in

    the creative growth of resource availability -

    with the caveat that local subsystems remain

    independent, because otherwise the drain on

    local resources will reduce subsystem

    effectiveness and cause an undesirable positive

    feedback loop by lack of sufficiently varied

    resources to sustain required tasks.

    A remarkable 2006 result of Dan Braha and

    Yaneer Bar-Yam 17 demonstrated that in a selforganized

    communication network, a

    continuously shifting hub of distributed activity

    causes the map to sometimes vary quickly and

    radically on local scales over short time

    intervals, even while the map itself shows little

    global change aggregated over long time

    intervals.

    This abstract model would mirror complex

    military movements and communications, if we

    considered the map as a theater of operations thesize of the globe. That is, each communicator in

    the network has at their workstation all the

    necessary resources to deliver a message and

    coordinate events, sometimes acting as the hub

    of activity, sometimes as the beneficiary of

    information and sometimes as provider of

    information. Point is, the metastability of the

    system over time suggests that a continually

    shifting range of activity represented by

    changing hub configurations is self limiting; as a

    result, the global domain is largely protected

    from the danger of positive feedback - i.e., a loss

    of system control and potential widespread selfreinforcing

    destruction.

    Etc.

    Didn't answer my question. What leader? What act? I think you understood not a word of what I wrote.

    Eckard, I think that an equitable distribution of resources, even with unequal consumption, will obviate 'leaders' entirely on the global level, and the need for them. The world is capable of self organizing around our common needs and desires, so long as we are willing to give up control of people, in favor of rational control of resources.

    Tom,

    I can't transfer enough parts in a single message. My message is: save us from saviors of the world. What we get is: Disruption; Sanity checks; Censorship; Blacklisting; Containment; Violence; etc.

    James Putnam

    The leader in my question was Yaneer Bar-Yam.

    James Putnam

    Then you are absolutely wrong, and don't comrehend a thing of what I've written.

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    • Post #28

    Tom,

    One misses concrete examples. For instance the Lim quote ("Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves") sounds meaningful, it makes linguistic sense, but what happens if it's applied to, say, Israel-Palestine or Northern Ireland? What are the "structures of the boundaries" as differentiated from the "inherent conflicts between the groups themselves"? More specificity please.

    The sideways idea is interesting. It has a warrant in the structure of societies in mid-evolution (say the feudal period in Western Europe ... distributed nodes were definitely the game). Studying the history trading routes is always fascinating. Why do societies become increasingly hierarchical and centralized? Actually, Marx had some thoughts about that. So does Pitteky more recently. It has a lot to do with initial conditions plus the fact that accumulation tends to accumulate accumulatively.

    A TV show my wife and I watch (we even record it when we're not home) is "Down East Dickering" on the History Channel. I see it as a sideways model even though I'm not conned by the scripted quality of some of the narrative. Anyway you observe wealth being created and consumed on a very elemental level by imaginative exchange of goods and services by skilled and decent people who know what they're doing. It makes one proud to be a human being.

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      • Post #30

      Nick, I agree about concrete examples. The Science article referenced has them -- I think it's available online without charge; if not, ping me and I'll shoot you a copy.

      The portion of Lim et al quoted in my essay continues: "Violence arises due to the structure of boundaries between groups rather than as a result of inherent conflicts between the groups themselves. In this approach, diverse social and economic causal factors trigger violence when the spatial population structure creates a propensity to conflict, so that spatial heterogeneity itself is predictive of local violence. The local ethnic patch size serves as an 'order parameter,' a measure of the degree of order of collective behavior, to which other aspects of behavior are coupled. The importance of collective behavior implies that ethnic violence can be studied in the universal context of collective dynamics, where models can identify how individual and collective behavior are related."

      So as one expects, the scholarly technical treatment to follow is pretty heavy sledding for an essay format.

      Thanks for the historical example; it sounds like something I'd like to look into. Though I agree with Popper about "the poverty of historicism," which is the Marxist-Leninist weakness. I think that the sideways view of history permits self-similarity in historical patterns over time scales, though it denies historical causality, i.e. dialectical materialism. It also seems capable of being the foundation of a true science of history if my own favorite definition of 'science' is true: "All science is the search for unity in hidden likenesses." (J. Bronowski)

      I'll also look up the TV show if I get a chance. Thanks for the kind words; I think a committed rationalist cannot but appreciate the harmony of life; local conflict dampened by local self determination.

      Best,

      Tom